Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another quick video here on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum of course, and one of the projects that I'm in the process of working on is
looking at the accuracy of a World War One heavy machine gun
actually mounted on its tripod at relatively long range.
... These guns were put in fixed positions with fixed fields of fire,
and my curiosity is how accurate were they at extended ranges, 300, 400, 500, maybe even 600 yards.
If you had a small group of soldiers could someone like hold the gun in that area,
fire a burst and hit a bunch of the guys or not? I don't know.
I haven't seen very much testing on it because it's the sort of thing that requires a lot of set up.
You need a long range. You need to actually have a gun that's in working condition,
which is not as common as you might think for some of these 100 year old now water-cooled, belt-fed sorts of guns.
And then there are a couple specific issues to the tripods and the mounts that come up.
One is do you need to have the mount sandbagged?
Because if you're shooting and the recoil is bouncing the whole tripod around,
well you're obviously going to be getting a lot of dispersion at long range from that.
And the other, ... the one that's a little more problematic for people these days
is making sure that the gun is mounted securely to the tripod.
You generally have a couple of cross pins that lock the gun into its mount.
If those pins are not ... like a good, solid, tight fit with the gun, then the gun will rattle on its mount on those pins.
And it's kind of like having a scope on a rifle but not actually tightening the screws down,
so the scope can kind of rattle on the gun. You get that same effect.
And so you're going to presumably lose a lot of accuracy there.
What I want to find out is if I've got a tripod solidly mounted down, and I've got a gun
properly, solidly mounted onto the tripod, how accurate is it at long range?
And the gun I'm going to be using for this experiment is a Hotchkiss 1914,
French of course (of course), strip-fed, air-cooled gun.
So today I went out to the range to start doing some experimentation towards this.
The gun's not 100% yet, but I found something really cool.
I am working on getting the Hotchkiss 1914 up and running. Out here at the range today to do some testing with it.
Got the bolt locked back, charging handle forward, feed strip in place.
... I think the locking piece is awfully tight and so the gun's not running perfectly yet,
but hopefully it'll run well enough to go through this ... strip, and there's something I want to show you, so.
Gun hot!
Alright, so ... still working out issues with it not quite feeding right.
I'm not entirely sure yet if that's the fact that I'm using these heavily Parkerised and not very smooth feed strips,
or if there's something else going on internally, but.
It's a machine gun, there's a process to getting them up and running.
One thing you may have noticed is that there was a ton of dust coming up here.
And I know exactly why, and this was a really cool discovery.
So let me clear this.
There we go.
Alright, gun is clear. Now if you'll come up and take a look at the front end of this thing.
We have this giant, railroad cow-catcher scoop of a muzzle brake.
... I've always kind of wondered why they had this on there.
My initial thought was it's to hide any flash from the gas cylinder down here, which
I didn't think there really would be any flash there, but well, who knows? What else could it do?
We now know exactly what it does, it deflects the muzzle blast straight down.
Creating this nice blast circle and blowing up all that dust.
I think I can see why they got rid of this.
They ditched these, partly because they were expensive and stupidly complicated for a gun like this.
And probably partly because this actually, I think, probably makes your gun's position more visible
than the simple cone flash hider that they replaced it with.
So that is a really cool revelation.
The gun isn't quite up and running 100% yet, but
it's always neat to try things out because you occasionally find interesting things like that.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]